Your Unconscious Matters: Why You Should Marry The Person You Dream About Most

I’ve been thinking about dreams a lot recently. It seems during heightened times in my life, my dreams are always much clearer and intense. Whenever I make a big change, experience something new or am wrestling with a decision, they are always very vivid.

It’s as if all those thoughts I don’t have time to express or reflect on come out full-force. Everything that wasn’t said, studied or attended to comes out in my sleepy, second world.

It makes sense, though. Sigmund Freud studied the psychological effects of dreams and their relationship to our conscious world -- points in the day when our feelings (even those we didn’t know we were having) aren't immortalized on pillows and closed eyes.

He suggested that if you want to understand what’s happening in the “real world,” you should study what’s happening in your unconscious one. Because when we dream, our unconscious mind takes over.

Like a child, our unconscious acts on its urges and impulses. It does not heed to logic or reason, but those innermost desires and basic urges. It represents those wants and needs we didn’t even know we had while awake.

In dreams, your unconscious shows you how it perceives the world in this conceptual form. It shows you its fears and its desires -- but not necessarily as you would expect to see them.

Freud believed that nothing we do occurs by chance. Every action and thought is motivated by our unconscious at some level. We are consistently censored by society and our conscious selves need to fit into certain molds and ideas of ourselves. Those desires we repress, however, must come out at some point. That point is usually in our dreams.

If your significant other is cheating on you in your dreams, it doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is doing the same in real life, but it does mean you’re thinking about it. It means you're upset about it -- consciously or unconsciously -- throughout the day.

It means something is wrong and you must figure out why before your relationship gets to a point at which you’re no longer dreaming about a broken relationship, but living through one.

The same can be said with any of our relationships. If our relationship with our mother isn’t going well, it will come out through a nightmare or symbols that represents that fractured relationship.

There are common symbols in dreams, like losing your teeth, which represents sexual repression and fear of being alone. Or drowning, which symbolizes feeling emotionally overwhelmed and depleted. These symbols are studied so we can figure out what our unconscious mind is trying to tell us.

While we have symbols for everything else, we don’t have symbols for those faces and names we see every day in our conscious world that show up in our dream one. That’s because there is no explanation needed. If someone is showing up in your sleeping mind, it’s because that person is meant to be there.

If you are dreaming about that person, you are thinking about him or her. And if you are reflecting on that person, pining after and dreaming of him or her unconsciously then maybe, just maybe, you should take it a little more seriously and ask yourself why that person is there.

This person means something to you

Why are you dreaming about that boy in your third grade class, or that girl in your Econ 402 forum? These people made an impression on you. Somehow they managed to wrangle their way into your unconscious mind and sit there, throughout the day, while you pretended to care about other people and things.

They show up at night when your guard is down and your unconscious mind is no longer repressed. They are there when you've stripped down to your most vulnerable form, ready to interact with you. They are there when you're tired and uninhibited, when you're alone and no longer distracted.

So when you wake up wondering why the hell you were dreaming about them, think less about why and more about what you’re going to do about it.

This person is your dream come true

OK, so it sounds lame, but that’s only because this kind of love is misrepresented in “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid." This person may not be your dream love in the sense that he is 6'2" or she has big boobs and a small waist, but he or she is, indeed, your dream man or woman.

He or she is the person you’re thinking about when your unconscious mind can travel to anyone else. Anyone! It could travel to Miranda Kerr or Gisele Bündchen, but instead, it traveled to that girl.

This is no coincidence, my friend; this is the real deal. If you want to live out your dream life than you may as well make that staple dream man or woman someone you can bring into reality.

Don’t spend your life dreaming

Nothing is going to happen if you don't pursue your dream love. But everything could happen if you do. Why waste night after night letting your unconscious mind lust after someone you have the power to pursue in your conscious world just to avoid a little rejection?

Why let the dreams and nightmares of this person be your only reality? Why ignore the signs? Why pretend that because that person is in your unconscious world, he or she doesn't mean anything, when in fact, that person can mean everything?

If you’re dreaming about someone it means something. If you don’t understand why that person is popping up in your unconscious, think long and hard about what your brain is trying to tell you.

Think why this person might be there, and if you can't figure it out, then try and see what he or she can tell you in the real world (without being too creepy, of course).